The impact of leadership and decision-making styles of sales managers on their performance

In today's world of information age, reaching to the knowledge and communication have reached the dimensions as never before. Customers are informed and have high awareness levels as never before. In this high knowledge transfer and information age, sales management has lot more issues than before. Sales managers are managing the sales process, they are leading sales representatives and also they have other management functions to carry out. Decision-making is the most important function of these. In this research context, a model is implemented to one of the Turkey's biggest logistics companies by survey method. Leadership and decision-making styles of 35 sales managers working within company have been identified. Then, 69 sales representatives working with these sales managers were asked to evaluate their managers, and the behavioral performance scores of each manager were determined. In the study conducted with the customers of the company, customer satisfaction was measured with the difference between the expected performance of a logistics company and actual performance of study conducted company. SPSS for Windows 22.0 (Statistical Program for Social Science) packeged software were used for data valuation. In the findings obtained by the analyzes, it was determined that the mentioned variables are related to each other and affect the performance of the sales manager. This study is important in terms of handling the performance of the sales manager with various variables, which is a very rare issue in national and also international literature. As a result of the research, significant and strong relations between the transformational leadership style and rational decision-making style of sales managers'and behavioral performance and company performance has been found. Key Words : Sales Management, Decision-Making Style, Leadership Features, Sales Managers' Performance, Customer Satisfaction